Trump: Has ‘the One’ gone off the deep end?

“Seldom in presidential history has more nonsense been expressed with greater concision,” said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. During a half-hour informal press conference last week, President Trump called himself “the Chosen One” to lead the U.S. in its trade war with China—and then looked heavenward. He accused the prime minister of Denmark of rudely “blowing off the United States” because she refused to sell him Greenland, repeated the anti-Semitic slur that Jews who don’t vote for him are disloyal to Israel, and branded himself “the least racist person ever to serve in office.” He also “joked,” alarmingly, about “being in office 10 or 14 years from now.” Every week, Trump slips further into “an alternate version of reality.” The president seems to be “unraveling.”

His tirade on the South Lawn “was a new, strange, and somewhat frightening level of antic,” said Rick Wilson in the New York Daily News. Last week, Trump also called his own Federal Reserve chairman a “bigger enemy” than China’s president, then tweeted that private American companies were “hereby ordered” to stop doing business with China. “When an elected official declares himself to be ‘the Chosen One’ or agrees that he’s the ‘King of Israel’ and ‘the second coming of God’”—all of which Trump has recently done—“it’s not time for a re-election campaign” but a “quiet stay with the nice men in white coats.” Since Trump isn’t going anywhere for now, said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, it’s high time for ousted Trump aides Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Daniel Coats, and H.R. McMaster “to make plain their concerns about the president’s fitness for office.” Voters deserve to be told what these men know all too well, which is that Trump is “nuts,” and getting more so all the time.

Admittedly, Trump’s behavior “is abnormal, if not insane,” said Erick Erickson in TheResurgent.com. “But I’ll take his crazy over the insanity the Democrats would unleash” on this country with their radical progressive agenda. For all of Trump’s nuttiness, “his policies are mostly normal.” And “for his supporters the show is part of his appeal, an ongoing reminder of his fearlessness and opposition to the establishment,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. On balance, this sort of behavior probably hurts him, but “Democrats nominate someone dull at their own risk.”